Despite only 3 hours sleep, I was awake at 1am when the throb of nearby J’Ouvert bands started invading my bedroom. I tried to doze as my alarm was not due to rouse me for another half hour. Not being a morning person, I surprised myself at how quickly I did my morning stretches and donned my J’Ouvert “costume”, gulping a cup of coffee at the same time. The anticipation got my adrenalin flowing. I checked in the full length mirror at how smart I looked in a white V-necked tight T and black bicycle shorts with white socks and trainers. I even put on a little make up though I knew my face was about to be plastered in paint and mud. Having loaded my waist pack with emergency dollars, toilet paper, mints, etc., attached my cup, rag and whistle to a cord around my neck, checked that I had my ticket, I was ready to join my posse and head on out to meet our J’Ouvert band.
This was a family affair with my sister, my niece and her partner, plus another friend. We got there early at about 3am that Carnival Monday morning in order to get a good parking spot in the zoo’s new secured car park. Good thing, as we missed the police causing a jam as they stopped vehicles on the Saddle Road looking for drunk drivers, etc. A DJ was playing, people were gathering and there was joyous greeting of old friends in the Caribs Rugby Club garden. Having indulged in two tasty doubles (no pepper), filled my cup with rum and soda with plenty ice, and taken one last bathroom break, I heard the call to hit the road just before 4am.
The DJ truck slowly pushed out onto the Savannah road, now made 2-way, though such niceties make no difference to Carnival bands! Traffic was stopped as masqueraders thronged onto the road. In the midst of the melee were the bar and mud/paint pick-up trucks, one dragging a bath tub filled to the brim with good clean mud. Revellers filled their cups with their favourite “poison”, as dispensed by young bartenders on the bar trucks. We all then chipped along the road and verges to the rhythmic soca music, looking for the mud. We soon merged with the steel band truck near to Stollmeyer’s Castle, bearing a large contingent of the renowned Silver Stars Steel Orchestra.
By now, several people had grabbed buckets of blue or green paint from the paint truck and started smearing (mostly) eager band members, or anyone who happened to be there. Some happy people immersed themselves in the mud bath and emerged to spread their joy by hugging all and sundry. Chests were offered to have colourful handprints cheerfully applied to strategic parts of clothing. Soon most of us were happily dripping a kaleidoscope of goo from our heads and bodies. Amazingly, a few tried to escape the onslaught, only finding themselves even more of a target by determined mud-slingers. This is “free up” time!
This was 2016 before the Rugby Club was destroyed by fire. We did not know that we were enjoying the music of the young Japanese pannist for the last time. I recently came across this description of the lesser-known annual start of Carnival, remembering that I couldn’t bring myself to continue writing about the fun of that day when the news of the girl’s untimely death on Carnival Tuesday was all around. Suffice to say that we all had a liberating time dancing to pan and the DJ for a couple of hours in the darkness. Soon we were treated to the spreading dawn over the Laventille Hills as we wearily followed the trucks around the Savannah back to the start point next to the zoo. We drove home, happy and dirty, ready for two more crazy days of the ‘greatest show on earth’.
